Main menu

Tag Archives: Tsarnaev

Featured

This is not Pakistan. This is not Somalia. This is not Yemen. This is not Libya; he should have continued.

We are waging war all through Western Asia and Africa. mainly against terrorists but we also took on Muammar Ghadaffi and now Bashar al Assad; the legitimate leaders of their respective countries.

We are still waiting on the case against Ghadaffi and for honest answers on the impending anniversary of the Benghazi massacre.

For a president who pledged to push the “reset” button, Mr. Obama has become the most warlike leader our country has ever known. In May he declared the “War on Terror”, which he had renamed “contingency operations”, over. Now he wants to go once again to war.

He drew a red line in the sand and then redrew it again and yet we still do not have a compelling case nor a desired end state for an operation in Syria.

The Syrians, Iranians, and Russians have promised a wider war should we act. Russian destroyers have been located to the Mediterranean near Syria to back this threat up, and the Iranians have promised missile strikes on Israel. We are in a high stakes poker game and Mr. Obama is the mark.

In the background the Saudi Arabians and Gulf Arabs are supporting some form of moderate resistance in Syria to counter Iran, but are unable to rein in the Islamist extremists. There is a tri-polar political conflict between the Sunni moderates; the Islamists and the neo-Iranian Empire. And then comes the ROW (Rest of World).

In reading the political history of the Ottoman Empire in the late 1700’s and 1800’s one can begin to understand the complexities and importance of stability in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Ottomans balanced constantly changing relationships very similar to today.

The dream of empire by Napoleon in Egypt and the changing alliances of the Ottomans with the British Empire, the Tsar, and Napoleon, especially with the fates of subject peoples such as the Greeks, Moldovans, Armenians, Bulgarians, Syrians, etc in constant play required that the Sultanate despite is decrepitude and corruption be upheld.

Now, 200 years later the chronological snobbery of the new great powers is leading to an even more volatile end state. Under the Sultan, Shia and Christian and Sunni were allowed to practice their faiths but now we have a state of religious civil war at hand. Egypt narrowly missed being drawn into the maelstrom. Libya is in constant tribal conflict.

But Syria represents a new Karbala, a call to the front lines for Sunni vs. Shia.

But this time the dark shadows of modern warfare overhang everything. Chemical warfare, air strikes, and heavy artillery generate massive casualties very rapidly. Syria is tearing itself apart with the help of a wide range of outside enablers. A dictator willing to use all means at his disposal is fighting to hang on.

And in Washington and Moscow and the West there is no clearly iterated reason for our involvement. We cannot abide the use of chemical weapons except when we can, as we did with Saddam Hussein’s use of poison gas versus the Iranians and his own people.

Mr. Obama means well, but the sad fact remains that the down side in getting involved in Syria is much greater than the up side.

Featured

It has been one week since the Boston Marathon bombing. We now know that the perpetrators were two brothers acting in jihad. A primary and a secondary device were planted to maximize casualties.

The perpetrators went to ground for 3 days before they surfaced. One of them, Dzhokhar Tsaraev, went back to his dormitory room and acted as if nothing had happened. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary to those who knew him. None of those who knew him seem to have any recollection of anything out of the ordinary leading up to the bombings.

The trail of the other brother, Tamerlan, is much more clear. At a certain point he turned towards a very conservative Sunni interpretation of Islam. His family was concerned. From what little we know of his wife, a convert, she adopted the hijab and lived as an observant Muslim in a small town in Rhode Island. Not the most normal state of affairs in small town New England.

Tamerlan began to follow ultra conservative imams and posted their sermons on his web page. He also posted jihadi videos taken in Syria and elsewhere.

According to Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, the FBI visited him at some point. According to Tamerlan’s father the visit was a warning. “We know where you live. We know what web sites you are frequenting. We know who you are talking to” was the message.

And yet this week the FBI reported that the U.S. government was asked by Russia to investigate Tamerlan, did so, found nothing amiss, and were legally required to close the file.

The United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars building a security apparatus that includes the most sophisticated surveillance systems; that allows for an unprecedented invasion of the privacy of its citizens, and that has access to virtually every database on-line.

When speaking with a FBI Agent based in the Santa Ana, CA office recently, I was told that the office had become one of the largest in the country because of the ongoing programs monitoring the Muslim community. Mosques have been bugged, imams are regularly interviewed, and close attention is paid to anything out of the ordinary.

And yet we find this week that Tamerlan Tsaraev was thrown out of his mosque in Massachusetts because of his radical and aggressive actions.

We also found that he spent six months in Dagestan, a known region for Islamist unrest, and may never have been questioned about his stay.

The UK’s Channel 4 reported that Tamerlan was under surveillance for 5 years. So said his mother. The Dail Mail reported:

The FBI said in a statement released Friday that it had investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaeva in 2011 at the request of a foreign government. The FBI did not reveal which country’s government that was.

‘The request stated that it was based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups,’ the FBI statement said.

The FBI said that in response to the request the bureau culled through its databases and interviewed both Tamerlan Tsarnaeva and members of his family, but were unable to find any evidence that he was connected to a terrorist organization.

It would seem that the Wall Street Journal’s account and that of the FBI differ, or perhaps there was more than one meeting. Tamerlan’s father mentioned no questioning by the FBI.

Regardless, it now seems obvious that Tamerlan Tsaraev should have been on the terror watch list at least 2 years ago. The question is why was he overlooked? The press does not seem to want to ask that question yet.

The press has also been remarkably forgiving of an administration that stonewalled on both Fast & Furious and on Benghazi. Will they ask the hard questions now?

1 – What are the full and complete circumstances of Tamerlan Tsaraev’s interactions with our government?

2 – How and where was he radicalized?

3 – How, where, and why did he take the steps to become a terrorist?

4 – Why did his family know and his mosque know he had become radicalized and the FBI not know?

5 – How and why did the FBI and other agencies, especially Homeland Security drop the ball?

6 – Could this have been prevented by better tactics and strategy?

The carnage was minimized through the heroic actions of many and a lot of luck. The apprehension of the perpetrators is still murky, but after the largest lockdown in American history, it was a citizen who made the final link. It was ordinary Americans who finally solved the case; a dead cop in Cambridge led to the chase to Watertown and a bloody exchange with the terrorists. Some guy who noticed a tear in his boat cover.

Did we need every SWAT cop within 100 miles out there marching around and searching without warrants? Did we handle the lockdown properly? Was it an intrusion too far on civil rights?

We need answers to all of these questions and we cannot afford to have bureaucratic or political agendas keep us from the truth.

Featured

10 days ago,, the Associated Press removed the term “Islamist” from its style book as a perjorative term for Muslim extremists. This morning we woke up to find that Islamist terrorists bombed the Boston Marathon on Monday.

The two terrorists, for they admitted that they did commit the act; in fact they bragged about it, were from Chechnya, one of the most violent places on earth 15 – 20 years ago. Chechnya experienced one of the most devastating civil wars of the past 100 years between the Russian state and Muslim separatists. As the war which began in 1994 expanded, brutality begat brutality. The First Chechen War ended in 1996, while the Second Chechen War ended in only 2009 after a 10 year insurgency.

The Moscow theater hostage crisis in 2002 where 170 died and the Beslan School massacre, where 380 people lost their lives in 2004 were perpetrated by Islamist terrorists. Grozny, the capital of Chechnya looked like Stalingrad 1943 after the first Chechen War. This is the reality of being Chechen.

Chechen fighters today are considered the shock troops of Islamist armed struggle from Bosnia to Afghanistan to Syria. mention Chechens to a jihadi and it is like mentioning the Navy SEAL’s or the pro’s from Dover to an American.

The Tsarnaev brothers were escaping that part of the world, it is clear. They were brought to this country and given refugee status. The elder brother, Tamerlan, came here when he was approximately 16. The younger brother was probably 9 when he arrived. At those ages, young men are very impressionable. And instead of dreaming of becoming firemen or cops or other American dreams they were isolated and insulated.

Somewhere along the way they became radicalized. One does not simply think to assemble and place improvised explosive devices one day. It is a process.

The press tells us that jihadi web sites such as Al Q’aeda’s have the manuals and instructions for the pressure cooker bombs used at the Boston Marathon posted.

Djohar Tsarnaev had Jihadi and Islamic devotional videos on his VK profile and linked it to a Chechen web site.

When confronted by a MIT campus policeman, Sean Collier, they shot and killed him. They then robbed a 7-11 and carjacked a man who stated that they had admitted to the Marathon bombing. Tamerlan died in a hail of bullets and may have detonated a suicide vest.

The cops are calling it terrorism, but not Islamist terrorism. At least not yet. Our government is deathly afraid of labeling it for what it is, just as at Ft. Hood.

But when it walks like an Islamist and quacks like an Islamist and smells like an Islamist, I think AP might want to reconsider the changes in its style guide and our president and his government their disconnect from reality.

There is a faction of Islam at war with us. On 9/11. In London. In Madrid. In Yemen. On a Christmas Day flight to Detroit from Amsterdam. At Fort Hood, and now in Boston.

Al Q’aeda was never an organization with clear lines and uniforms and unit patches. And Al Q’aeda is just one part of Salafism. You can go out and say you’re an AQ without having a membership card or you can go out and blow up innocent civilians and not affiliate yourself. But the motives and results are the same. Death to infidels. That’s why the term Islamist was used in the first place.

All Muslims are not Islamists, but all Islamists are Muslim. The president “vanished” the Global War on Terror. It disappeared from the lexicon. But it never disappeared. Not in Benghazi nor in Boston.

The Tsarnaev brothers are simply the latest link in a chain of Islamist terrorism that will continue until the Muslims themselves extinguish this fanaticism.